Singapore blogger, lawyer and general pain in the ass of the Singapore government, Gopalan Nair was back in court Monday. He is now facing new charges and his bail conditions mean that he has to report to the police station every morning at 9am and can be held there all day.

His life is on hold, but there is virtual silence from the blogosphere. What’s happened to all of the hype about freedom of expression.

Turn your back until it’s your turn to be persecuted, then wonder why you’re alone.

I’m keen to keep up with the Gopalan Nair case, so today I visited Chia Ti Lik’s blog. Ti Lik is Nair’s lawyer and so fairly close to the case.

The most recent post is one I’ve already linked to, dated 5th June. But I started to re-read it and realised that Nair is likely to face a sedition charge when he appears in court again on Thursday 12 June.

Singapore’s sedition law is a product of old colonial rule – as is so much of “law” in former colonies – and it had fallen into disuse until recently. It was used in 2005 against a small group of bloggers who were allegedly inciting racism against Malays. This was apparently the first time since the mid-60s.

The sedition law was originally used to prosecute alleged communists in the early post-war years. The Cold War was very useful then and it still is today.

SGpolitics.net is a good place to get updates. A 6 June update quotes a US Embassy official as saying:

‘The embassy continues to follow the case very closely. The United States consistently advocates freedom of expression, including the Internet.’ [Yeah right.]

A number of other Singapore-related blogs are also commenting quite frequently.

The States Times blog suggests that human rights have been abolished in the Singapore legal system.

Freshly minted Attorney-General Walter Woon had declared human rights is “all hyprocrisy and fanaticism,” and posited “that we should not confuse public law with politics, and that some people assume that their definition of human rights is the decision of the rest of humanity.”

I’ve had a bit of time this morning to look for more news items about Gopalan Nair – the blogger arrested and charged with defamation in Singapore now out on bail. Nothing in the New York Times or the Guardian. The Sydney Morning Herald is carrying the AFP wire story I referred to in an earlier post.

There’s some coverage in the Straits Times, which claims it is “independent” even though the government-owned investment company Singapore Holdings is the largest shareholder.